Are Your Projects Ready For Year-End?

Have you returned all of your gifts?  Has your indigestion from over-eating cleared up yet?  Are your Christmas Decorations stored away for another year?  Have you made your New Year's Eve plans?  Are your projects ready?

Projects?  Year-end?

Yes, especially at year-end.  This is a great time to assess the health and status of your organization's projects.  It's an opportunity to set New Year's resolutions for the sake of your company's accomplishments.

Chrissy over at the Executive Assistant's Toolbox posted a great article about preparing for your annual review.  There are some useful year-end checklist points which can be extrapolated to doing an annual review on your projects as well.

At the Project Level:

1. For completed projects, did they end on time, within budget, and with a significant number of the promised features?  (If not, find out WHY.  See if there are repeating trends across projects.)
2. For current projects, is it on track (same criteria as above)?  Again, dig a little deeper if the answer is no.  Take corrective action on the problems that are preventing your projects from being successful (and it may mean removing people, as unpleasant as that may sound).
3. For current projects, is regular communication occurring?  If 70-90% of a project manager's job is communication, are you as the business owner receiving meaningful status reports?  Is the team playing nice in the sandbox?  Do your clients and suppliers know what is going on?
4. For current projects, is there a baselined and actively updated PROJECT PLAN?  If not, stop work until there is one.
5. For pending projects, is there a BUSINESS CASE (or project charter or statement of work or whatever you want to call it)?  Bottom line, is some document being created which outlines why this idea should be a project?

At the Portfolio Level

1. Are all of the projects being tracked collectively as well as individually?  Do you know how much of your annual budget is going toward project activity?
2. Do you have a dashboard in place which gives you a quick-at-a-glance visual of the project activity and performance?
3. Are your resources aligned to the right projects at the right times?  How many stops-and-starts are occurring across your project portfolio?
4. Are you tracking cancelled and rejected projects, and the reasons for them?
5. Are you identifying and tracking trends in project success and rewarding those responsible?

As you approach 2008, assess your project activity regularly to avoid surprises when it's time to look at 2009.

Carpe Factum!